Mario Carreño (1913-1999) - Vlinderdans

Rare painting by the Chilean/Cuban artist Mario Carreño. It is an oil on board with dimensions 72.2 x 51.5 cm. It is signed and dated bottom right. The condition is good.

Provenance
Sarracino Gallery, Coral Gables, FL, USA
Fernando Duran Auctions, Madrid, auction Arte Contemporaneo, 28 December 2020, lot no. 43

Mario Carreño
(1913-1999)

At the end of the last century, one of the masters of Latin American art faded from the scene when newspapers announced the death of Mario Carreño. Carreño was a true avant-garde artist who promoted the spirit of modernity in Cuba in the 1950s and helped spread it into the salons of that era. His versatile and passionate personality drew me to his paintings. Through getting to know Mario Carreño through his work, I was able to appreciate his use of composition and design and his sense of color, a subject he taught at the School of Architecture in Chile (1959).

Mario Carreño (1913-1999).

Carreño was born in Cuba in 1913 and studied at the San Alejandro School of Fine Arts. Like many painters of his time, he traveled to Spain, Paris, and New York, where he absorbed the diverse artistic currents of the period. In this phase of his life he came into contact with surrealists, both physically and intellectually, and he met Lorca, Picasso, Rafael Alberti, and Neruda. Mexican muralists were important for Carreño's work. During his trip to Mexico in 1936 he met Diego Rivera, Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo, and Frida Kahlo. But it was his trip to Chile that had the greatest influence: he first visited Chile in 1948, when he exhibited his work at the Sala del Pacífico in Santiago. After a period living in New York and Cuba, he returned in 1986 with a two-year contract to teach a course titled “The Development of Contemporary Art.” From that moment Chile would become his second homeland, a “paradise,” as he himself once called it. In 1969 he acquired Chilean nationality and in 1982 he received the National Art Prize, in acknowledgment of his artistic achievements.

For this deeply humanistic man, the act of painting was important, but he was also a painter of words. He was an art critic for the newspaper El Mercurio, where he presented his innovative and progressive ideas under the pseudonym Jorge Vasari. He emphasized the ambivalence in all possible interpretations of art and the confrontations to which art is subjected. It was not enough for him to name a tendency or movement. He wanted to explore and investigate and left us a versatile body of work as a result of his quest to express his ideas. In his work one can discern certain characteristics, such as his interest in shaping his figures, the absence of facial features and, hence, the stillness he conveys. Each of his works reflects a harmonious relationship between form and content. The impeccable nature of his visual language made him a connoisseur of volumes and the creator of a truly clear and pure style. At the same time, he liberated his pictorial influences from any form of passivity and gave his work a sense of color, movement, and sensuality, which had already become emblematic of Cuban art.

His visual language was complemented by his sense of social involvement. Together with other Chilean artists, he re-discovered and integrated folk art into his own work, in series such as Whole Chile. He was sensitive to the suffering caused by wars throughout the century, which he expressed in his series The Fossil World. His nostalgia for his homeland is evident in Antillanas. Mario Carreño died on December 20, 1999. An exceptional and simple man, who unknowingly crossed the universal threshold and forever became part of the ‘chronology of memory.’*